Today's business information systems maintain a large number of documents. For example, the customers of business intelligence (BI) systems have numerous repositories where information is piled up as a result of day-to-day activities. Efficient life cycle management in such overcrowded environments becomes a very challenging task. Life cycle management (LCM) primarily involves flow of objects, e.g., software or data components, between different information system environments, such as development, testing and production environments, defined in a common computer system landscape, e.g., enterprise computer system landscape.
Usually, the separate computer system environments, in a landscape, work autonomously. The flow or transportation of objects from one environment to another is typically followed by updates or adjustments to fit the transported objects in the new environment. Such updates ensure that objects interact properly with their new dependencies and without unnecessary downtime. For example, a BI Report's application objects may be developed in a development computer system environment, tested for acceptance in a test environment, and transported for live consumption in a production computer system environment. Each of the computer environments may have its own resources to be consumed by the BI Reports, e.g., separate servers, databases, etc. Hence, on arrival in a new computer system environment, database connections of a BI Report have to be overridden to point to databases available in the new environment. Otherwise, the BI Report may fail or run properly, which can result in downtime period for the current computer system environment.
The big number of software, and data components maintained in enterprise computer system landscapes, requires a lot of resources for their lifecycle management (LCM). Often, LCM involves manual updates of the transported objects, which creates conditions for overhead, errors and extensive downtimes. This creates critical and all-encompassing problems that arise across different objects and across different user scenarios. For example, a customer may have set a draft description for each of many objects in a development environment. Whenever any of the objects is transported to a production environment, the assigned draft description must be replaced by a final verified description. Task of performing such changes, regardless of how complex or simple they are, may involve manual operations over a number of objects over a number of transports. Often, the number of such objects and transports exceeds several thousands in large and even midsize enterprise computer system landscapes.